Are Green 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 incompatible?

McKinsey on the growth of the Data Crunching Web and its energy impact:

Companies are performing more complex analyses, customers are demanding real-time access to accounts, and employees are finding new, technology-intensive ways to collaborate. As a result, demand for computing, storage, and networking capacity continues to increase even as the economy slows. To cope, IT departments are adding more computing resources, with the number of servers in data centers in the United States growing by about 10 percent a year. At the same time, the number of data centers is rising even more swiftly in emerging markets such as China and India, where organizations are becoming more complex and automating more operations and where, increasingly, outsourced data operations are located. This inexorable demand for computing resources has led to the steady rise of data center capacity worldwide. The growth shows no sign of ending soon, and typically it only moderates during economic down cycles.

And as they show, the power consumption will be no small contributing factor to the Greenstrain on the planet:



Solution - First address the wastage:

Within one media company, almost a third of the nearly 500 servers we analyzed had utilization rates below 3 percent, and nearly two-thirds were below 10 percent. This company used none of the number of readily available management tools for tracking use. On a global basis, we estimate daily server utilization generally tops out at 5 to 10 percent, wasting both energy and employed capital.

Second, forget about the need for New Green Centres, just sort out what you have first:

When we began our research, we expected to find that building new energy-efficient data centers would offer the best hope of reducing their cost and carbon footprint. New facilities could take advantage of current technologies that make use of natural cooling and of power supplies that produce fewer emissions. However, we also learned that the most dramatic reductions in cost and carbon emissions come from improving the low efficiency of data centers that companies already operate. Through better management of assets, more accountable management, and setting clear goals for reducing energy costs and carbon emissions, most companies can double IT energy efficiency by 2012 and halt the growth of their data centers’ greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the greenest data center is the one that you don’t have to build.

Thirdly, stop drinking the Freeconomic Kool Aid and stop lying to yourself about "Data being too cheap to meter"

In many organizations, data centers are treated as buckets waiting to be filled, rather than as scarce and expensive resources. To combat this tendency, companies can adopt true cost of ownership (TCO) accounting when estimating costs for new servers or additional applications and data. Lifetime costs of running applications and operating servers are rarely included in spending decisions by business units, software developers, or IT managers. Building them in upfront can help limit excess demand.

Finally, give the problem and its management to someone who has an overarching view.....

We suggest a new governance model for managing data center needs, with full responsibility and accountability falling to the CIO. Under such a regime, the CIO would have much greater visibility into the data demands of business units and could enforce requirements that energy consumption and facilities costs figure into return-on-investment calculations for new data projects requiring additional servers or software applications. We also suggest that CIOs employ a new metric for measuring progress. With sharpened accountability, the CIO will have greater incentive to seek improvements, such as virtualization and better use of existing facilities.

...because if you leave it to "empowered individuals" they will suboptimise, f*cking up the companies profits and the planet at the same time:

Frequently, managers purchase excess devices to guarantee capacity in the most extreme usage scenarios, creating large amounts of excess capacity. And managers often build facilities with excess floor space and high cooling capacity to meet extreme demands or all expansion contingencies.

Multiplied across an organization, these decisions result in both costs and environmental implications.....Within the organization, managers optimize for their own interests, resulting in the inefficiency observed in most data centers. In many instances, only a single software application runs on a server.

Thats puts the kibosh on a lot of Enterprise 2.0 dreams then, which rely on departmental subversion - nixed cos it ain't Green .

I note that McKinsey did not cloud the issue with Cloud computing either, using the term "virtualisation" which I prefer - because that is really all you are trying to do in creating efficiency - how yu do it is tactics, and it clarifies the issues. In fact, McKisey is suggesting there is a long way to go for exsting companies before they need to consider any form of outsourcing at all